XMRV and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome Harvey Whittemore and his wife, Annette, were frustrated by lack of answers for myalgic encephalomyelitis/Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients, including their daughter. In an effort to solve the CFS problem, they created the Whittemore Peterson Institute in 2005; Mikovits became the research director in 2006. Attempts to find a viral cause of CFS were unsuccessful. In 2007, Mikovits met a co-discoverer of xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV), Robert Silverman, at a conference. Silverman had found XMRV sequences, which are highly similar to mouse genomic sequences, in prostate cancer specimens several years earlier. Using tools obtained from Silverman, Mikovits began to look for XMRV in her CFS samples. In late 2008, a graduate student, who subsequently was hired as her technician, obtained two positive results from a group of twenty samples. He and Mikovits successively altered the experimental conditions until all samples gave a positive signal. In 2009, Mikovits and co-workers reported in the journal Science that they had detected XMRV DNA in CFS patients and control subjects. Negative results were published soon after, disputing Mikovits's findings. Silverman, who was a co-author of the original XMRV-CFS article, told the Chicago Tribune that he was "concerned about lab contamination, despite our best efforts to avoid it". Two of the original authors of this paper subsequently reanalyzed the samples used in the research and found that the samples were contaminated with XMRV plasmid DNA, leading them to publish a partial retraction of their original results. In December 2011, after a request by Silverman, the editors of Science retracted the paper in its entirety. Lo and Alter, in their 2010 paper titled "Detection of MLV-related virus gene sequences in blood of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and healthy blood donors", stated "Although we find evidence of a broader group of MLV-related viruses, rather than just XMRV, in patients with CFS and healthy blood donors, our results clearly support the central argument by Lombardi et al. that MLV-related viruses are associated with CFS and are present in some blood donors." This paper was also later retracted by the authors. On September 29, 2011, Mikovits was terminated by the WPI due to disputes over the control of lab samples and the integrity of her work; she subsequently came under investigation for alleged manipulation of data in her publications related to XMRV. On November 18, 2011, she was arrested at